Pixel Scroll 5/29/18 The Future Is Pixelled, It’s Just Not Evenly Scrolled

Worldcon 76 has issued the 2018 Hugo Awards Voter Packet, a collection of finalists for the 2018 Hugo Awards made available to members of Worldcon 76 to assist them in making informed decisions when voting on this year’s Hugo Awards. The packet is available for download from the Worldcon 76 Hugo Awards website in the “Hugo Voter Packet” section. Members of Worldcon 76 can sign in using their Hugo Award voting credentials that were sent to them when the final Hugo Award ballot was issued.

Only members of Worldcon 76 can access the 2018 Hugo Award Voter Packet and vote on the 2018 Hugo Awards.

…Worldcon 76 will shortly send an announcement regarding the availability of the Hugo Voter Packet to all members who registered their e-mail address with the convention. This mailing will include a copy of the member’s voting credentials (membership number and voting PIN). Members can request a copy of their credentials using the 2018 Hugo Awards PIN lookup page.

One letter is from producer David Heyman, who sent Rickman a thank-you note after 2002’s Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. “Thank you for making HP2 a success,” it reads. “I know, at times, you are frustrated but please know that you are an integral part of the films. And you are brilliant.”

like, wiscon does not dole bans out lightly, and I have been in the audience for and have heard of so much bullshit that we let go because, well, sometimes people have bad takes that don’t necessarily rise to the level of abuse, mostly just cluelessness

Avila outlined several of his frustrations with the group but said he quit because it was requiring him to agree to a community code of conduct to attend its conference.

That code of conduct basically says the group is open to people from all walks of life and expects its members to be courteous.

Avila also said he was unhappy that the project had decided to accept an intern from a group called Outreachy, which offers paid internships to women, LGBTQ folks, African-Americans, people with Hispanic or Latin heritage, and those with indigenous American ancestries.

In other words, the internships are for people in underrepresented gender and racial groups in the programming/open-source worlds; white men and Asian men are the two groups best represented in tech, diversity reports have found.

…Despite that kind of rancor, large open-source communities and conferences are increasingly adopting community codes of conduct.

And for good reason — the open-source world has a reputation for aggressive, rude, and intimidating behavior.

In 2013, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and the god of open-source programming, was called out for profanity-laced rants on the Linux email lists, which set the tone for the open-source world.

He and the Linux community did an about-face — sort of — in 2015, telling members that their work would be criticized but asking them to “be excellent to each other” and to feel free to report abuse.

At this stage of James’ Tour of Disco-Era Women SF Authors, we have reached M. Certain letters are deficient in authors whose surnames begin with that particular letter. Not so M. There is an abundance of authors whose surnames begin with M. Perhaps an excess. In fact, there are more authors named Murphy than the authors I listed whose names begin with I….

Sondra Marshak is best known for her Star Trek-related activity. Star Trek, an American science fiction television show akin to Raumpatrouille—Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffes Orion, was cancelled after seventy-nine episodes in the mid-1960s. An anthology of original stories commissioned a decade after a show’s cancellation seems unthinkable and yet in 1976, Marshak and Myrna Culbreath’s co-edited collection, Star Trek: The New Voyages, was published by Bantam Books, soon followed by Star Trek: The New Voyages 2. This suggests that the show’s fandom managed to survive the show’s demise. Perhaps some day there will be a revival of this venerable program—perhaps even a movie!—although I must caution fans against getting their hopes up…

Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of historical fantasy novels: Ghost Talkers, and The Glamourist Histories series and the forthcoming Lady Astronaut duology. She is also a three time Hugo Award winner and a cast member of the podcast Writing Excuses. Her short fiction appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Tor.com, and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer, lives in Chicago. Visit her online at maryrobinettekowal.com.

Lawrence C. Connolly

Lawrence C. Connolly is one of the writers for the anthology film Nightmare Cinema, premiering next month at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Produced by Mick Garris, the movie goes into wide release later this year. Connolly’s books include the Stoker finalist Voices (scheduled for re-release this summer), This Way to Egress, and Veins. More at LawrenceCConnolly.com.

(7) FUNDRAISER. Tessa B. Dick is trying to raise $5,000 through YouCaring to “Keep my home”. She’s got $4,205 in contributions as of this writing. Her May 28 update said:

I really need your help, or I am not going to make it. I don’t know how to explain that I can’t sleep because every time I close my eyes, I see that gang banger with a knife to a boy’s throat. I can’t go anywhere because every time I walk out the door, I see his gangster buddies coming after me because my testimony put their buddy in prison. I got crisis counseling and I coped for twelve years, but I can’t cope any more. I went through major forest fires in 2003 and 2008, a severe burn to my foot in 2007, a head injury in 2010, a broken leg in 2012, and more stress than I can describe. I got a settlement for the head injury that didn’t even cover my medical bills, which is why I had to go bankrupt.

I should qualify for disability, based on my severe weight loss alone, but they keep turning me down. My only hope is to get this house in good enough shape to get a reverse mortgage.

(8) GAME MAN. Rich Lynch was tuned into tonight’s Jeopardy! In the category “Award Winning Books” one of the answers was:

(9) TRIVIAL TRIVIA.

Crayola crayons’ distinctive smell — ranked 18th in a list of the 20 most identifiable smells in a 1982 Yale University study — is largely due to the stearic acid used to make the waxy consistency. Stearic acid is a derivative of beef fat.

Tens of thousands of pop culture buffs took a pilgrimage to the ExCeL this bank holiday weekend for the UK’s largest comic book convention.

…Monolithic entertainment brands seemed keen to continue cashing in on the nerd demographic, wheeling out a long list of stars for the event, including Black Panther’s Letitia Wright, The Defenders’ Rosario Dawson and Khary Payton and Cooper Andrews from zombie series The Walking Dead.

The authors suggest we may not be too far away from cracking the mysteries of higher, unseen dimensions and negative or “dark energy,” a repulsive force that physicists believe is pushing the universe apart at ever-faster speeds.

“Control of this higher dimensional space may b? ? source of technological control ?v?r the dark energy density and could ultimately play ? role in the development of exotic propulsion technologies; specifically, ? warp drive,” the report says, adding: “Trips to the planets within our own solar system would take hours rather than years, and journeys to local star system would be measured in weeks rather than hundreds of thousands of years.”

However, Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at Caltech who studies and follows the topics covered by the report, had a lot of cold water to pour on the report’s optimism.

“It’s bits and pieces of theoretical physics dressed up as if it has something to do with potentially real-world applications, which it doesn’t,” Carroll said.

“This is not crackpot. This is not the Maharishi saying we’re going to use spirit energy to fly off the ground – this is real physics. But this is not something that’s going to connect with engineering anytime soon, probably anytime ever.”

Today, Twitch begins a seven-week endurance run/celebration of all things old-school Doctor Who, live streaming over 500 episodes worth of adventures in Time and Space. Unless you happen to have seven weeks of free time starting imminently (in which case, I envy you), you likely can’t sit down and watch all of it. So here’s a few must-watch storylines to dive in for….

If you’ve ever wondered if there’s really something to this whole “dimensional transcendentalism” thing, a.k.a. the explanation given as to why Doctor Who’s TARDIS is so tiny on the outside but enormous on the inside, now’s your chance to find out for yourself. A TARDIS created for Peter Cushing for the 1965 film Dr. Who and the Daleks is getting ready to hit the auction block at Ewbank’s as part of its “Entertainment & Memorabilia” auction, which kicks off on May 31.

(18) DIVIDENDS. Absolutely true.

Holy carp-on-a-stick.

As I was reading through the Hugo packet, it suddenly occurred to me that I contributed to a Hugo Finalist Fanzine last year (https://t.co/r2df5vmY2b). So in a very tiny way, I've been nominated for a Hugo. https://t.co/r2df5vmY2b

124 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/29/18 The Future Is Pixelled, It’s Just Not Evenly Scrolled”

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@Hugo Packet NetGalley EPUB Users: If you get an error E_ADEPT_REQUEST_EXPIRED when opening a NetGalley .acsm file you downloaded (which FYI is basically just a link; opening it tells Adobe Digital Editions [ADE] to download the real EPUB file), try re-downloading the .ascm file from NetGalley.

I’d downloaded them earlier tonight, but didn’t open them till hours later. Each one gave that error; I believe those little link files are time-limited. I downloaded them again just now and they all opened fine, and ADE downloaded all 9 EPUBs without error. Yay!

TL;DR: Don’t bother clicking the EPUB link at NetGalley till you’re ready to open the file you download, at least based on my experience.

@Oneiros: “Also I saw an article the other day (link lost to the mists of time, sorry) where the creator said he’d be interested in continuing with Lucifer as a comic. Would that be the first comic based on a tv show based on a comic spun off from another comic?”

It would not. Both Batman: The Animated Series and Smallville have gotten continuation comic book series. Riverdale also has a comic book series dedicated to the TV show continuity, but it’s a companion rather than a continuation. I would not be at all surprised to hear that there are other examples.

@Cora: “One puppy type managed to call me both a Nazi and an crazy SJW leftist, which takes some doing.”

Not once you realize that they see “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” and categorize the Nazis as militant lefty socialists. Same word, same thing, right? 🙄 See also their snarky references to the state Mitt Romney once governed as “The People’s Republic of Taxachusetts” as a way to identify Massachusetts with Communist China, not to mention “feminazis.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if white Southerners weren’t regularly reminded that they are the descendants of slaveholders and that they’re probably racist, because their ancestors were.

I see that pretty frequently online. A certain type of online liberal positively revels in the abyssmal quality of life in much of the South, crowing something like “you reap what you sow” while conveniently ignoring that there are plenty of liberals in the South. I personally am a blue dot in one of the region’s reddest states, and I know I’m not alone. Even in the most lopsided elections, where the Republican typically wins 75-25, that still means there’s one liberal for every three conservatives. That’s not small.

On a more personal level, I’ve noted before that at the time I broke with a certain branch of local convention fandom, many of them were nice to me… at least in part because they thought I was one of them in a political sense. I could name several prominent Puppies who fall into that category. See, I look (and, to some extent, talk in casual conversation) like a good ol’ boy, and I became acutely aware that this granted me a kind of protective coloration that would shield me from verbal abuse as long as I laughed at the right jokes and kept my mouth shut on certain issues.

One non-fandom example from my childhood, which I did not recognize at the time as what it was, involved seeing a joke book which had a whole section of jokes about “niglets.” I vaguely recall a mention of “not being able to use the (other? right? traditional? something like that…) word anymore” and coining that one instead, and I don’t think I have to spell out what the forbidden word was. The framing was basically that these were just good old-timey jokes with that word swapped out for modern consumption… like, the author seemed genuinely oblivious to the idea that the racism is the problem, not the specific word used as the racist slur.

Also the kindle files (actually AZW) are only sendable to a real kindle (or kindle for Android) and not downloadable to Kindle on PC (using Amazon document management). However it is very easy to copy them from the Kindle to the PC (once connected via USB) to import them into Calibre.

@Lis What I see in YHL’s Story is somebody who is very ready to raise the alarm at the slightest hint of wrongness, giving very little thought to the very real damage they can do to possibly completely innocent parties (and in the case of YHL’s daughter, certainly innocent parties).

You are very keen to judge Darren based on his supposed agenda, motives and personality. Well, I judge Coffeeandink on her apparent willingness to do damage to actual living breathing human beings in support of Just Causes. And this is not the first time I saw her being vicious to people in service of Righteousness.

I am sure in all cases she meant well, but sometimes it is not just the intention that counts.

I am even less in love of kicking a longstanding Wiscon attendant out of the con and telling everybody that she engaged in Nazi apologia without even doing her the courtesy of listening to her side of the story, in service of a desire to be righteous.

Right wingnut talk radio has been calling anyone they disagree with a Nazi since at least the mid-1980s. A prominent right-wing writer published a book titled Liberal Fascism.

It was such a constant refrain that Dave Neiwert published a point-by-point list of the attributes of fascism with discussion of how each item applied (or didn’t) to the then-current Republican Party.

The current inhabitant of the White House kept a copy of My New Order on his nightstand back during his first marriage. His campaign manager gave him a copy of Mein Kampf with a personal inscription. And he famously said after the Charlottesville march that “there are good people on both sides” rather than condemn the alt-right marchers.

I’m reasonably certain that when Lisa Freitag started talking about sympathy for her Nazi forebears, that Trump statement is what was echoing in a lot of people’s ears.

I’m occasionally told that I need to learn more about my “people” because of my stance on “Southern Heritage”. (“Heritage, not hate!”) It’s amusing to watch their eyes cross when I trot out my Colonial-era pedigree and cite every Confederate unit I had family in. I always start with “I have no illusions about my ancestors. Wanna see the slave inventories?”

But being blamed for the vices of your ancestors is precisely what often happens to people who happen to belong to a group that has done horrible things in the past. Your personal political stance doesn’t matter, what your actual ancestors doesn’t matter, how long ago it was doesn’t matter (the American Civil War was more than 150 years ago), you’re damned just by being a member of a group whose ancestors collectively did horrible things.

I’m sorry, I should have written “But just as the vices of one’s ancestors SHOULDN’T reflect poorly on yourself…” Blaming someone for the vices of their ancestors is a horribly wrong thing for people to do, whether they are doing it to Germans who have no guilt for what their ancestors did, today’s Northern or Southerners who aren’t perpetuating those lasting hangovers from those old battles, or for that matter Jews who have no guilt for their ancestors supposedly having killed Christ. It’s fine to speak out against being attacked yourself unjustly for what your ancestors did, and all people seeing it happen should also be speaking out against it. And I agree it’s quite possible some such previous attack may have influenced the panelist’s responses on this occasion.

A certain type of online liberal positively revels in the abyssmal quality of life in much of the South, crowing something like “you reap what you sow” while conveniently ignoring that there are plenty of liberals in the South.

Some even post that stuff here. Hatred of the US South is one of the few remaining socially-acceptable bigotries.

Hatred of the US South is one of the few remaining socially-acceptable bigotries.

And some days, when the unreconstructed jerkitude gets too deep, I even agree with them.

One reason Germans are generally not reviled in Europe is that they did own up and confront their past. The US South still hasn’t, as the various statues to people of varying deploritude show. I am not convinced completely by restorative justice, truth and reconciliation commissions, and the like, but it is a possible solution to closing some wounds.

I wouldn’t be surprised if white Southerners weren’t regularly reminded that they are the descendants of slaveholders and that they’re probably racist, because their ancestors were.

I see that pretty frequently online. A certain type of online liberal positively revels in the abyssmal quality of life in much of the South, crowing something like “you reap what you sow” while conveniently ignoring that there are plenty of liberals in the South.

Not to mention forgetting that there are many African American, Hispanic, and other people of color living in *the South.*

Not to mention forgetting that there are many African American, Hispanic, and other people of color living in *the South.*

That, too. Indeed when some otherwise nice white progressives more or less cheered as Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, I told one of them, “You are aware that most of the people dying down there are probably black.”

More than anything else, the stereotypes about the South frustrate me because they are so often an attempt to pass of a national problem as a regional problem. It really just become a way for a large section of the country to avoid confronting its own complicity in the problem. It sounds like there were similar responses to the ones Cora describes in response to the hurricanes in Texas, which is really an awful response.

Without attempting to adjudicate the situation at Wiscon, which I still feel fuzzy about, I find myself having a couple responses to the controversy.

1. I’m inclined to agree with microtherion (I hope I got your name right) that a lot of the difficulty is tied into the slipperiness of the term, “Nazi” which has a number of meanings that discuss often quite different populations, ranging from conscripts for an authoritarian government to active partisans who supported that government to a variety of authoritarian political activist organizations. When you add the SFF element, you start getting even more complexity.

2. The questions of how to understand the culpability and complicity of ordinary Europeans in the crimes of the Nazi regime is an extremely complex question that has been debated for decades, and is incredibly contentious. On one hand the regime was brutally authoritarian, but it was also very popular for a good portion of its existence. It’s hard to draw the lines within that context. The work of Hannah Arendt comes immediately to mind as an effort, as well as films such as Germany, Pale Mother. I think that Anna Feruglio Dal Dan has done a really good job of bringing up some of those complexities and fraught decisions.

3.Within that context, it doesn’t surprise me that an attempt to engage with the conversation could go quickly off the rails within the context of a fan debate, and that’s what seems to have happened within the WisCon context, at least by the informal description of the conversation that was provided.

@Robert Wood More than anything else, the stereotypes about the South frustrate me because they are so often an attempt to pass of a national problem as a regional problem.

Yes. Jim Crow lived in the North, many of the Northern states were slave-owning at one point in their history, and even after the end of the Civil War, when African American slavery was ended, the entire Union continued to do as bad and worse against American Indians.

The Hugos are for both science fiction and fantasy, thus, no separate fantasy category.
…
All the same, the Hugos are for sff, not just sf.

Thank you. I think this is good. For me, the difference between SF and F is less than between either and much of what is considered to be “mainstream” fiction. (When it matters, I prefer to say “speculative fiction”. Not all Fantasy lives up to that term, but then neither does all of SciFi.)